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The Space: The
best setting for a Painted Light Theater production is a large open-air
space, a public square surrounded by high buildings or the courtyard of
a castle, for example. Indoors,
it can be a large hall or stage, on which we will set up an installation
of reflective material: an abstract sculpture, which will serve as a 3D
screen for the projections. It
is a vision in space. A magical sculpture of Light, Color and Sound
surrounding the audience. An overwhelming audio-visual experience, to
which the public is seldom exposed, and which has always met with
enormous success. The
Light Projections: For
the performance we use two BP6 HMI 6 KW Pani projectors, with 18 x 18
cm slides, working in cross-fading. The characters, landscapes and action of the music appear as a succession of abstract paintings of light. They are never still, but change continually, evolving in synchronization with the music.
“Marco
Polo” Tan
Dun’s opera “Marco Polo”, winner of the Grawemeyer Award, today’s
most prestigious prize for classical music, was commissioned by the
Edinburgh festival and premiered in Munich in 1996, at the New York City
Opera in 1998, and toured then from Vienna to Tokio and Hong Kong. |
The opera describes the journey of Marco Polo, the young Venetian merchant and traveler, from Venice to China, in the year 1271. The
opera moves on three kinds of journey. A
spiritual journey, going through the human being past, present and
future. A
geographical journey from Venice, over the sea, to a Middle Eastern
bazaar, then to an Indian desert, the Himalayas of Tibet, and finally to
the Great Wall and the court of Kublei Kahn, the emperor of China. A
musical journey: the opening music suggests Peking Opera, then moves to
medieval European, the Middle Eastern, Indian (with sitar and tabla),
Tibetan ritual horns, Mongolian chants and Chinese pipa. The
fusion of musical sounds from all corners of the globe is, for Tan Dun,
the definition of “Marco Polo”. In
the Painted Light production, the characters of the opera, Marco, Polo,
Rustichello, Kublei Khan, Sheherazade, etc., appear as symbolic images,
alternating or superimposing over abstract renderings of the landscape:
the sea, the desert, the Himalayan snows. -
Marco,
the young explorer, Polo, his memory, Rustichello, the narrator, appear
in the opening as masks. -
The
Piazza in Venice: a mosaic of colored marble. -
The
sea: blue and golden waves indicate the beginning of the journey, at
dawn. -
A
storm in the water and in time: a vortex of colors and lights. -
Bazaar:
a crowd of Masks. -
The
desert: Scheherazade appears as a dance of waving patterns of color. She
wants to seduce Polo. To keep him in the desert. But does not succeed.
She become hysterical. The waves of light scatter suddenly and disappear. -
The
desert is silent. The journey goes on. -
Kublei
Khan appears as a red disk, surrounded by blue, green and golden wings,
the symbol of his power. |